It was an overwhelming week, but good. I am impressed with the teachers, the administration, and the students. We were all grateful for only a four day week to begin, and now the real grind will start. The hardest part? Learning the names. Several of the kids have the same names, and I need to not only learn which goes to who, but how to pronounce it. It is not a bad things, just an added stress. 7 classes of 25 kids…it will take me time! But I already have a few of the “bad ones” down

This weekend was awesome. Friday night four of us went down to the beach and tossed a frisbee around. 3 of us ended up in the water, either by tripping, chasing the frisbee, or being tackled. The sun was setting, and the water felt amazing. Afterwards we made chocolate chip cookies and played nerts. It was a little piece of home…it almost felt like vacation. I am so thankful for it!!!

Last night I ate at a fancyshmancy place called the Golden Tulip. We were one of two tables in there, so of course they sit us right next to the live music stage. Three men singing arabic music. It was almost a flashback to the local music scene in nashville, but not quite. It was a cultural experience for sure, but with all the warm bread you could want, you cant complain!

Today, Sunday, I have missed home more than any other day here. Sunday’s are always hard, but I think now that there is a routine, it is starting to hit more that I’m staying here, and right now with limited contact to the states. I actually went to a friends myspace page that has some of his songs up so I could “hear” his voice. Although it was a weekend full of people and adventures, after only a month there is not the depth of relationship that you long for and miss back home. But I know it will come….I am hopeful.

--Written by a Teacher in North Africa--

The report said there were "significant lapses in judgment and performance," a lack of supervision by senior managers preoccupied with Iraq and other countries and a badly designed security system subject to politicization. Britain's David Veness, who was under-secretary-general for safety and security at the time, resigned in June after an earlier inquiry criticized failures in his department.

Ralph Zacklin, who headed a separate panel charged with assigning blame for lapses contributing to the attack, said the panel recommended administrative measures -- which could be as little as a letter of reprimand -- against six individuals. Four more could face more serious disciplinary action, he said.

"There were significant lapses in judgment and performance on the part of those involved," a summary of the report said, pointing to a lack of supervision by senior managers who were preoccupied with Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia and Sudan."Algeria was not on the radar screen," it said.

Zacklin said it would be for Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to decide exactly what action the 12 individuals would face."It's for him to look at our report, decide whether or not he wishes to follow our recommendations," Zacklin told a news conference. "He has the discretion to do that."

Zacklin said the five-member panel also recommended assigning collective responsibility to the security management team in Algiers, a body which includes representatives from all U.N. agencies on the ground and which was supposed to coordinate Security measure in the field.

SOURCED FROM REUTERS.

The dead include a mother found clutching her baby, state news agency MENA reported. At least 10 others were injured, and rescue workers were combing the ruins of the five-storey building for more victims, MENA added.

Samih Nazmi, a 28-year-old storeman who lived on the ground floor with his parents, said the building made a sound like an exploding gas cylinder when it collapsed.

"Luckily the ground floor was mostly intact. My parents and I climbed out through a gap into the neighbouring house," he told Reuters at the scene of the collapse.

The building, in the centre of the Mediterranean city, was built in 1955 and the owner added a fifth floor in 1997 in violation of building regulations, a common practice in Egypt, police sources and residents said.

The residents had complained to the local authorities that the building was unsafe and the authorities had ordered the removal of the fifth floor and other structural changes, they added. But the orders was not implemented, they said.

Thirty-six people in six households lived in the buidling but some of them were not at home at the time, they said.

Migrants: I recently stumbled across an excellent recent report, by Hein de Haas from Radboud University Nijmegen, on the indispensable migration site migrationinformation.org The statistic that most jumps out from Haas' excellent study of the changing nature of Moroccan migration is this interesting tidbit, "Receiving $3.6 billion in official remittances in 2003, Morocco was the fourth largest remittance receiver in the developing world."  Given that measuring remittances is a tricky business we can be sure that the IMF's current estimate that remittances constitute 9% of Moroccan GDP is actually low. That's a lot of money especially for a small country which is otherwise dependent on two other major industries: phosphates and tourism for revenue. While the math in these estimates is always a bit fuzzy according to Haas' report there are 3 million Moroccans living abroad or something close to 10% of the population.  Now, you don't have to be an economist, (which is good because I am most definitely not) to realize that this is a lot of revenue coming back into the country and a tremendous boost to Morocco especially given that the two other major sources of domestic income are so dependent on the well being of external markets. Remittances give Morocco a regular, fairly steady, and critical boost of cash that it desperately needs especially if fewer tourists decide to holiday in Marakesh this year due to the current credit crunch.  Given this critical flow of cash it's interesting to examine Moroccan incentives for cracking down on illegal immigration which has been a major focus of negotiations with the EU in recent years.

This is ongoing research on my part but I for one have to say that I am not too surprised that in a quick survey of reports of successful interventions on the part of the Moroccan Navy in the last few years stopping or capturing illegal immigrants either to Spain or the Canaries most of the articles that I have read make mention of a high number of "sub-Saharan" Africans detained but rarely mention illegal Moroccan migrants.  It seems clear that despite the worsening economic conditions in Spain, Moroccans are probably still traveling in significant numbers to Europe-- so I doubt it's that smugglers aren't taking Moroccans over, but rather that it's in Morocco's interest to be rather selective in which smugglers they interdict.  Of course not all, or even most remittances from abroad, come from illegal Moroccan migrants but it seems that capturing and sending sub-Saharan Africans home or simply letting them go allows the Moroccan officials to give Spain and the EU hard numbers and point to the success of their growing naval presence in the Mediterranean and Atlantic and reassure European allies that migrants or asylum seekers from Mali, Nigeria, and Coite d'Ivoire aren't going to be washing up on the Canary Islands and spoiling anyone's holiday in the sun while simultanesouly allowing Moroccans to get through to Europe and contining a critical stream of money which if it were to cease, would be devastating for the Moroccan economy. Even in a year, like this one, where I would expect to see a downturn in Moroccan (indeed probably global) remittances it's going to be a big blow and unless something unforseen picks up you can expect this year to be a tough one for Morocco economically.  Given how little wiggle room there is for Morocco's economy you have to wonder why on earth Morocco would be motivated to stop one of their most lucrative exports: people.

Hashish: Much has been written on the vitality, robustness and well being of the Moroccan hashish industry. Famously King Muhammed V permitted the cultivation of hash, known as "Kif" locally, in 1956 after trouble in the Rif region, located in the mountainous northeast of the country, over the French prohibition of kif cultivation threatened the stability of the region.  You can read an interesting history here on the long tradition of kif cultivation in Morocco (in French) but given this history it shouldn't be surprising that the illegal sale and export of hash is a signficant industry today.  UNDOC estimates the total cash economy of the hash industry at 12.5 billion, and this is even given a reduction in the total amount of "the cannabis-cultivated land in the north of the country from 134,000 to 76,000 hectares." Given the considerable size of the industry it is perhaps not a shocker to learn that there have been periodic charges that various important Moroccan officials have gotten involved in the traffic of hashish, including most famously the head of the former King's Security Haj Mediouri (see an interesting article in MERIP here.)

The comparison here is pretty obvious: what incentive does Morocco have, apart from maintaining its good relations with the EU, to really crack down on the exportation of people or hashish? For a country that, while significantly better off than much of North Africa, is still struggling to develop, with a GDP of approximately USD $50 billion, Morocco would be crazy to significantly reduce two critical streams of income especially if doing so would risk ratcheting up tensions in the Rif or reducing even slightly the amount of remittances the country receives each year.  Who cares that these are two illicit economies that are a major EU security headache? People and narcotics are two well established and hugely profitable Moroccan exports and as such are not likely to vanish anytime soon.  Recent allegations that the sale of hashish has been used to  fund terrorist operations might get the US to weigh in and try to put pressure on Rabat to do more to reduce kif production and I wouldn't be surprised if the current bilateral discussions with the EU over the creation of a free trade zone didn't include demands for concessions about cutting down on both hashish and illegal immigrants but given the current economic realities, the lack of the development of economic alternatives, and no strong incentive for the Moroccan government to significantly crack down no one should be surprised to see these two industries growing healthily into the future.

-C

We all know The Nativity and all about The Star that foretold the coming of Christ but the question is - was that star a meteor?

It could have been - and will all the talk going on around the world about Ms Rapture surely it would have been better aimed to go across the sky in the US/Alaska rather than North Africa.

All said though; I would loved to have seen it.

Spectacular!

via Asteroid to be harmless fireball over Earth - CNN.com.

(Chapter XI, section 10)

North Africa, introduction

North Africa is today an integral part of the Mediterranean world, but it has not always been so. It is land taken over by Mediterraneans, rather than basic Mediterranean country; for this reason it, like Europe, is racially complicated by the survival of Neanderthal-inspired Upper Palaeolithic food-gatherers. This survival is important only in a few places and among small populations, and in this respect North Africa differs greatly from most of Europe. The Mediterranean inroads began here earlier than in Europe, and since North Africa was the highway over which many of the Mesolithic and Neolithic invasions of Europe passed, it is natural that it should have a more thoroughly Mediterranean complexion.

From the beginning of the third millennium onward, northern Africa enjoyed, throughout Egyptian and classical history, the hazy repute of a region peripheral to great centers of culture. From the beginning of the first millennium B.C., the Phoenician colony of Carthage spread eastern Mediterranean civilization into Tunisia; after the fall of Carthage, the Romans extended the enlightened area to include much of Algeria, while the Greeks had already colonized the coast of Cyrenaica. At the time of the Arab invasions, North Africa was fast becoming a backyard of Europe. The advent of Islam brought this process to a violent end, and it did not begin again until after the conquest of Algeria by Napoleon.

Ever since the earliest notices of North Africans on the Egyptian monuments, the native inhabitants of North Africa have spoken Hamitic languages of the closely knit Libyan family. There is very little dialectic difference between them, and it is possible for a Riffian, for example, to speak with an Algerian Kabyle. Similarly, the Berber speech of the natives of Siwa Oasis, on the eastern extremity of the Berber world, is surprisingly like that of the Braber tribes of the Moroccan Middle Atlas, some 3000 miles distant. When contrasted with the complex Cushitic family of Hamitic speech, Berber appears extremely homogeneous, and we are warned by linguistic principles that its spread over the immense Berber area cannot have been too remote in time. It is possible that tones earlier Berber languages have disappeared, and that the present ones owe their distribution to a relatively recent diffusion.

There are, however, remnants of pre-Hamitic speech in various parts of North Africa. The Guanche spoken in the Canary Islands, at the time of the Spanish conquest, early in the fifteenth century, was only party Berber, and contained a large percentage of words of unknown linguistic affiliation. In modern Riffian and in other Moroccan Berber dialects, there is still a residue of non-Hamitic words in the local languages. For example, plant names ending in -nt or -nth may be seen in the word iminthi, meaning barley, and in shinti, meaning rye. These words have also been noticed in Indo-European languages of the northern Mediterranean shore, such as Greek and Albanian, and are generally attributed to the so-called Caucasic or Mediterranean linguistic group, which is the B element in Indo-European. It is very likely that agriculture, including the use of these two cereals, was introduced into North Africa by pre-Hamitic peoples.

Although there can be no doubt that Libyan Berber was spoken in the part of North Africa with which the Egyptians were in contact as early as 3000 B.C. and earlier, especially since there is a Libyan element in ancient Egyptian, we cannot assume the same for all of North Africa. It is possible that pre-Hamitic languages were spoken in Morocco and in isolated mountain regions in Algeria and Tunisia until much later, perhaps as late as the time of Christ, since there are strong Riffian traditions of people living in remote valleys who did not speak languages identifiable as tashilhait, or Berber.

According to the Arabian genealogies, all Berbers are descended from two men: Berr ibn Branes and Berr ibn Botr.79 These two Berrs, although possessing the same name, were not related. From them are descended the great families of Berbers such as the Masmuda, Senhaja, and Zenata. Of all these great families the earliest to spread seems to have been the Masmuda or Ghomara branch. This was followed traditionally by the Senhaja, who today include such varied peoples as the Siwans on the borderlands of Egypt, the Tuareg of the Sahara, and the Braber of the Middle Atlas in Morocco. The third great expansion was that of the Zenata, who were known in Roman times in Cyrenaica, but who did not reach Algeria and Morocco until the Middle Ages. In the thirteenth century these Zenata finally invaded Spain, conquering Arabs and earlier Berbers. One may compare the expansions of the Berber families to those of Kelts, Germans, Slavs, etc. in Europe.

   Unlike the later writings of mediaeval Arabs, the Egyptian and classical notices of Berbers do not assign to them an orderly descent from a few patrilineal ancestors in a typically Semitic scheme. The Egyptians, throughout their artistic history, took pains to distinguish the Libyans from other peoples by well-defined physical peculiarities. The Libyans are shown as active barbarians, clothed in animal skins, and wearing ostrich plumes in their hair; they are definitely white men, with lighter skins than either Egyptians themselves or Semites. Their faces are usually more sharply cut in profile than those of the Egyptians; the browridges are often prominent, the noses aquiline, the chins pointed, and the beards moderately abundant.

During the Old Empire, the Libyans are depicted as brunets; but in New Empire representations we see a change in the appearance of some of them. One branch, the Tehennu, known to the Egyptians from earlier times, still consists of brunet white men, but another group, the Mashausha, coming from farther west, is definitely blond.These two, the new people and the old, joined forces and attacked Egypt from the west. In dress and in other respects, there is nothing to indicate that the Mashausha were not Libyans.

Herodotus, in later times, places the Maxyces in western Libya, and states that they were culturally different from the purely nomadic Libyans to the east. The continuity of the name Mashausha through Maxyces extends to Mazuza, a sub-tribe of Riffians, and to the term Imazighen, by which many of the Berber groups designate themselves, and thamazighth, by which they identify their language.

These Maxyces, or Mashausha, as described by Herodotus, Sallust, and others, seem curiously un-African in some respects. They drive about in chariots, drawn by fiery horses; their garments are covered with gold;
they sacrifice oxen by strangulation, in a central Asiatic manner; the details of their council form of government, as revealed by a study of its modern counterpart, the Ait Arbain, are strangely Altaic.

While it would not be prudent to press this argument too far, it is quite possible that one or more of the invasions of West central Asiatic peoples which reached Palestine during the Bronze Age, or during the time of the earliest use of iron, crossed the Delta into northern Africa and kept moving across a country which offered little feed for cattle and horses, until they reached the Algerian and Moroccan grasslands. Herodotus specifically states that these people were descendants of Persians. In any case, the horse and chariot entered North Africa from the east; either some Libyans took both from the Egyptians and spread them westward, or a specific people brought them in. The hypothesis of an Asiatic invasion of blond horse-users is not necessary to explain the Mashausha, nor the modern incidence of North African blondism, but, as will be seen later, it agrees perfectly with the present distribution of races in this area.

The history of North Africa during the last five millennia, as dimly outlined by oblique literary and artistic references, and in the absence of adequate archaeology, is not as simple a matter as the early Arab historians, who codified Berber tradition in their own pattern, supposed. It appears to have consisted of a succession of invasionS of Hamitic speaking peoples, mostly nomadic, interspersed with various outsiders, and later of Arabs, into the territory of agriculturalists of Neolithic cultural tradition and of basically European racial character. The Ghomara-Masmuda invasion is one of the earliest which may be salvaged from Berber traditional history, and this was followed by that of the Senhaja, and finally by that of the Zenata. Although the main direction of these expansions seems to have been from east to west, from the Hamitic center to its periphery, this is not true of all of them. The Senhaja, in at least part of their history, moved eastward.

In remote parts of Barbary are still to be found clans and families who cannot trace their ancestry to one of these noble Hamitic lines, or to Arabs, but who admit descent from indigenous heathen or from Christians. These families are called by Marmol “Berbers without name,” and represent the last survival in mountain communities of pre-Hamitic patrilineal family lines, except in those cases in which descent from Romanized Christians of various origins is indicated. Even in the clans named after Hamites or Arabs, the indigenous blood may be strong through continuous female infusion and through adoption.

The Masmuda and Ghomara, who made up the earliest invasion on record, are said to have come from Rio de Oro, as are the Senhaja, according to one tradition. There is, however, a story in both El Bekri and Ibn Khaldun that Ifrikos, the ancestor of the Senhaja, came from the Yemen, not long before the birth of Mohammed. This curious legend is supported in ways unknown to the Arab historians, for cultural traits diffused by some of the Senhaja-speaking peoples include terraced agriculture with irrigation, high earthen tigremts or castles, architecturally similar to those in southern Arabia, textile techniques, textile designs, and pottery forms and decorations all of which are strikingly similar to those in the Yemen.

The Zenata, who appeared in Roman Africa in the third or century A.D. and did not invade northern Morocco and Spain until the twelfth century,81 brought with them the camel, which they passed on to some Middle Atlas Braber tribes, who, separately or in combination with them, developed into the Tuareg. These Zenatan invaders were what Gautier calls les grands nomads chamelliers, the tall, lean, desert people, riding on camels, clothed in blue, and veiled, who trickled along the northern rim of the desert, and who took from Rome the outlying portions of her African empire.

The introduction of the camel changed profoundly the life of the North African plains, although it had little effect on that of the mountains. The wheel disappeared completely; the barbaric Libyans with their bronze and gold vanished from history, and those of them who were not absorbed by the newcomers and who refused to adopt the new economy took to the hills, to found rustic family lines among the mountain farmers. The camels of the newcomers pulled up the grass by the roots, flayed the trunks of all the trees which they could reach, hastened the process of soil erosion, and made the plains of North Africa at last truly African in appearance.

With the introduction of the camel, however, the Sahara became once more suitable for more than a sub-marginal human habitation. At some time during the late Pleistocene or during the periods of post-pluvial climatic change, negroes and negroids had moved up to occupy the oases and mountains of the northern Sahara, and the southern fringe of the Atlas country. Kufra was a negro oasis until the Arabs took it, and the course of the Wed Dra’a is the home of the Haratin, an insufficiently studied group of negroes. With the camel, white men moved down into the Sahara as swiftly riding nomads, enslaving the scattered groups of local negroes, and bringing others up from the Sudan in slave caravans, to cast a negroid tinge across the racial complexion of North Africa, which had hitherto been wholly white man’s country. Most of the slave trading, however, was carried on in Arab times, and indeed, the Arabs arrived in North Africa not long after their most useful animal, the camel.

The Arab invasions of North Africa can be divided into two waves, the first which came directly from Arabia, shortly after the death of the Prophet, and which brought families of aristocratic Arabs from the Hejaz and Yemen. These invaders came mostly without wives, married Berber women, and founded towns and dynasties. Although they converted much of the countryside to Islam, they did not force the Berbers to accept Arabic speech, which was confined, at that time, to the cities. In the eleventh century came the second Arab invasion, which was one of much greater volume and importance. This was the invasion of the Beni Hillal and Beni Soleim, tribes of apostate Bedawin from the Syrian Desert, who had made nuisances of themselves by pillaging caravans. This Hillali element introduced the first numerically important infusion of Arab blood into North Africa. The Beni Hillal and their companions settled first in Cyrenaica; thence some of thcm moved on to the Algerian plateau country, and to the country just south of the Atlas in the Moroccan Sahara, and onward to Rio de Oro. Other bands passed from Algeria through the Taza gateway down the trik es-sultan, to occupy the Moroccan plains along the Atlantic coast, from Safi to Tangier, and inland to Fez and Wezzan.

At present the inhabitants of North Africa are about evenly divided between Arabic and Berber speech, with the former commoner in the east, and the latter in the west. Although the Siwans speak Senhajan, the Cyrenaicans, largely Berber in blood, have been Arabized in language. Aside from the Tuareg, who also speak Senhajan, the next most easterly area of Berber speech lies in southern Tunisia and eastern Tripoli. In Algeria Berber is spoken by two important Berber groups, the Kabyles of the coastal mountains east of Algiers, and the Shawia of the Aures Mountains farther south. Oasis people, such as the Mzabites of Ghardaia, are also Berber speakers, as are the inhabitants of the Tunisian island of Jerba. In Morocco Berbers hold more land than do Arabic speakers; the whole northern strip from east of Melilla nearly to Tetwan, is occupied by Riffians and Ghomarans; the whole Middle Atlas by Senhajan Braber, and the Grand Atlas west of Demnat, by Shluh. In the lowlands east of the Middle Atlas, on the Algerian-Moroccan borderlands, and reaching up into the Riffian territory, are tribes of Zenata.

Throughout North Africa there are tribes and confederations of Arabized Berbers, and also some Berberized Arabs. Language and ethnic origins do not always coincide, and North Africa must be studied as a whole. The present North African peoples, apart from Jews and negroes and European colonists, represent a blend in different proportions between descendants of the old Afalou race, the Mesolithic and Neolithic Mediterraneans, the hypothetical central Asiatic nomads who may or may not have brought in the horse and chariot, the Hamitic-speaking tribesmen whose relationships are east of the Nile and in Ethiopia, and the two waves of Arabs. The regional variation between these elements reflects, in the main, varying proportions of the different components. An exception is seen, however, in the coastal region of Tunisia, where the Carthaginian state had its center, and where there may survive a minor Punic element, and the Islamized descendants of the much more numerous Greek and Italian settlers of the Roman period.

The funds are invested according to the sharia which avoids interest-bearing loans and gambling, pork and alcohol-related activities. Profits made are distributed among members.  >>>>>

Cairo is a bit too much to handle considering the chaos and the crazy driving. Even though it is not the best city to visit, but it is a must only for the Pyramids and the Museum. The Sinai desert and Dahab are just 2 spots never to be missed if you ever plan a trip to Egypt. Waking up at 1am for a hike and see the sunrise is breathtaking and snorkeling in the red sea is a wonder.

Downside of the trip: The food wasn’t to our liking and the water gave us few problems otherwise it was a great trip for us and would definitely recommend it to anyone who wants to visit Egypt and not be stuck on a bus with 50 other travelers.

Pete and Erika from Vancouver, BC

(AP)

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) — A European tour group kidnapped in the Sahara Desert was abruptly freed after a phone call to one of the captors, and all 19 hostages piled into a single car, some clinging to the roof as they drove 200 miles to safety.

The accounts Tuesday by the freed Europeans and their Egyptian guides contradicted reports from Egyptian security officials who described a dramatic rescue involving gun battles between Egyptian forces and the hostages, with state news agency quoting the defense minister that half the kidnappers had been killed...

 Al-Qaeda's North Africa wing chief has urged all Muslims to join jihad (holy war) and slammed governments in the region where group has claimed frequent attacks, United States monitoring service said.

The group has also issued new threats against Western interests, including France, Spain and US States.

Threat comes close on heels of last two week's deadly suicide-bomb attack on heavily fortified US embassy in Yemeni capital Sana'a, claimed by terrorist outfit Islamic Jihad in Yemen.

"Unite around holy war that is the only alternative power to apostate regimes that dominate over our lands," Abu Musab Abdul Wadud, leader of Al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), said in an audio speech posted on Sunday on Islamist militant websites, said SITE Intelligence Group.

Mr Abdul Wadud blasted regimes in Mauritania, Algeria and other North African countries, charging that Mauritania has become a nest of foreign intelligence at its forefront Mossad, and has become a station of crusader colonial ambition," he said, according to a SITE transcript.

"History will continue to mention that this is first Arab country, outside of Tawq (Arab nations surrounding Israel) that recognised state of Israel and exchanged ambassadors with it," he said.

SITE said the remarks came in a 29-minute video titled "A message to our ummah (nation) in the Islamic Maghreb."

Mr Abdul Wadud also claimed that former colonial power France continues to impose its authority in Algeria, using the Algiers government as a proxy. Algeria is threatened not only by France, but also by United States which seeks to install military bases there, he charged.

Al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb has repeatedly claimed responsibility for deadly attacks in Algeria, including an increase of bombings in July and August, and also been blamed for an ambush on a Mauritanian patrol last two week that killed 12 Mauritanians and found 11 soldiers and one civilian.

Mr Abdelmalek Droukdel, leader of al-Qaeda's North African warned Algerian officials that if they sought refuge there as the confrontation with al-Qaeda increases it would be a mistake, implying that French territory could also be targeted.

An Algerian authorities was Mr Droukdel's main target, he accused them of fighting a proxy war against Islam in the name of US and French interests.

He cited as proof US plans for military bases in Sahara Desert to fight trafficking and terrorism, and a French-backed effort to create an alliance between European Union and countries south of Mediterranean Sea.

Mr Droukdel's group is a militant faction left over from a civil war in 1990. It joined Osama bin Laden's terrorist network in 2006. Since then, violence has dramatically increased with more than 100 people killed in August alone.

I don't cook Algerian food very often, the meals we eat are quite eclectic so it seems that hubby is missing all the Algerian delights he would be enjoying if he were spending the month of Ramadan back in Algeria with his mum, sisters, brothers and extended family. Today he made a special request for Chicken Chtit'ha which is a very simple Algerian dish which is essentially chicken cooked in a tomato and garlic sauce.

You need:

1 small onion

3 cloves garlic 

1 teaspoon salt

1/8 teaspoon black pepper

1/8 teaspoon chicken spices/baharat/ra's al-hanout

1/8 teaspoon paprika

2 whole Allspice (the round ones that look like large peppercorns)

2 teaspoons tomato paste concentrate

1/2 can chickpeas

pieces of skinless chicken - this amount of sauce should be good for 2 or 3 whole legs

water

To make:

• Use a cheesegrater (with the largest holes) and shred the onion into a pan containing 1 tablespoon oil then using a finer grater, grate in the garlic.
• Saute on a medium heat taking care not to over colour the onions.
• When soft, add the chicken pieces and fry to seal.
• Add the spices and tomato paste, stir well and add 1/4 cup of water and the chickpeas.
• After a short while add another cup of water and bring to the boil and then reduce the heat to low-medium.
• Stir regularly and add small amounts of water if and when necessary.
• If you like it hot, add 1 teaspoon of harissa with the tomato paste.

The end result should be tender pieces of chicken in a thickish sauce that you can eat with bread; you don't want it to dry out but also you don't want it tobe too runny and soupy.

The Kurfursterdamm, the Prado, Fifth Avenue, every vital world center has its signature thoroughfare. The Olney of my childhood and youth was no exception. We had Fifth Street. Sitting on the small concrete porch of our row house, we could see the traffic on Fifth Street less than a block away. Day and night, the Route Forty-Seven trolley cars, our link with the larger world outside the neighborhood, whooshed and sparked up and down Fifth Street. Like a young Sam Clemens, I too came of age along the banks of a mighty and continuously busy social and commercial lifeline. At least that’s the way Fifth Street seemed to me at the time.

Fifth Street was one of the original grid streets in William Penn’s utopian City of Brotherly Love. Its meridian line or zero point was the city’s center at Market Street. While Fifth Street went south for twenty or thirty city blocks, its northern reaches stretched almost seventy blocks to the city line where Cheltenham Avenue gave way to the leafy suburban vastness of Montgomery County.

On Fifth Street, Olney began at Roosevelt Boulevard and ended at Godfrey Avenue, the northern turn-around point for the Route Forty-Seven trolley car line. Within that stretch of seventeen city blocks defining the north-south course of the neighborhood, only the three blocks, those between Somerville Avenue and Chew Street met the magical criteria for “up Fifth Street,” as in “you going up Fifth Street tonight?”

Before suburban malls and strip shopping with parking lots, when most city people, particularly working class city people, didn’t own cars, local shopping districts were vital destinations, virtual town centers. My parents, both of whom had grown up in the neighborhood, had at least a nodding acquaintance with many, and sometimes most, of the people we’d encounter on the sidewalks or in the stores up Fifth Street. The three blocks of Fifth Street shopping were a complete, if diminutive, commercial universe that met most of the consumer needs of the neighborhood. There were two five-and-dimes, a Stanley-Warner movie house that changed pictures three times a week, and a range of retailers offering everything from fresh fruit and ground meat to refrigerators and Lionel electric trains. But the higher prices and the limited selection on Fifth Street sent my mother, and many of the housewives on our street, on regular trolley and subway trips downtown to shop the great department stores that lined Market Street east of City Hall.

Once Fifth Street passed north of Roosevelt Boulevard, you were in Olney. Fifth Street at that point was tree-lined and residential. Belgian block pavers anchoring the trolley tracks rattled and clattered under the tires of passing cars. Down the long hill to Lindley Avenue, a mish-mash of low-end, storefront businesses lined Fifth Street beginning with the Lindley Movie Theater on the corner at Rockland Street.

The Lindley’s vintage was pre-Hollywood. It had opened in the early days of silent films, and my mother, as a child, had gone there with her grandmother. She told me of applauding the piano accompanist whose walk down the aisle signaled the start of the show. By the time I discovered the Lindley, the enterprise had a funereal quality to it. Everything was old, dingy and short on repairs. On a rare father and son outing, my father took my brother and me to the Lindley to see “King Solomon’s Mines” starring Stewart Granger and filmed in color on location in Africa. For some period of time after that matinee, I entertained the possibility that I might grow up to look like Stewart Granger. With the advent of television and the demise of movie-going, the Lindley Theater got a second wind as a banquet hall, a place for First Communion parties, wedding receptions, and benefit dances called “Five-Dollar Nights.” For the eponymous price of admission, a Five-Dollar Night offered a live band and all the beer you could drink. Despite the dress requirement of a coat and tie, the events were a recipe for mayhem, and all too often the evenings ended with the cops summoned to restore order.

I was present for the start of one of the hallmark Lindley Theater episodes of my times. A regular habitué of the theater was a guy named Jiggs McNally. Jiggs was a serious, seven-night-a-week beer drinker, and on Friday or Saturday night, he went to the Lindley. It didn’t matter much to Jiggs what was playing. He would stop at Bowen’s taproom down the block, pick up several quarts of Ortliebs. Before taking his seat, Jiggs would go into the men’s room. Standing on the old dining room chair that propped the door open, he would stash his beer, less one bottle, in the cold water of the wall-mounted flush tank above the bank of urinals. As the movie progressed, and Jiggs finished one of his quarts, he would go back to men’s room, take a leak, stand on the chair, and retrieve a fresh quart of Ortliebs from the flush tank. It was an efficient system of elegant simplicity.

On this Friday night, I’m in the Lindley with Fritz McGowan, Louie Reardon and Raymond Walters. We were all in eighth-grade at Incarnation, thirteen or fourteen years old. Coming in, I had spotted Jiggs sitting across the aisle. Just after the start of the movie, Raymond and Fritz left their seats. A minute or two later, they were back, both of them trying to stifle their giggling. As Fritz sat down, I heard the sound of glass clanking. A whispering Raymond leaned over and asked if Louie or I had a bottle opener. I had an immediate premonition of trouble. Jiggs McNally was a grown-up of sorts, and not somebody to fuck with. He might be a lush, but he carried himself with an air that spoke of a potential for serious menace. I turned to Louie Reardon and said, “we ought to get out of here, right now.” By then, I was hoping Jiggs hadn’t noticed me in the theater. Louie and I slid out of our seats trying to avoid Jiggs’s line of vision. Raymond and Fritz were so full of themselves and of their little beer coup, they paid no attention to our departure.

The story that came around was that when Jiggs went back to the men’s room to replenish his stock, he let out a roar that was heard out on Fifth Street. Rushing out to the top of the center aisle, he began shouting threats of death and worse to the culprits if he got his hands on them. The film flickered to a stop, the house lights came on and Jiggs ran down the aisle to where Raymond and Fritz were trying in vain to bury themselves in their seats. It was said that Jiggs lifted Fritz McGowan up out of his seat with one hand and swung at him with the other. The quart of Ortleibs that Fritz was holding hit the floor and shattered. Raymond dropped his quart on the plush of the seat, scampered through to the far side, and crashed open an exit door as the manager and the old usher wrestled Jiggs away from Fritz.

Fritz was ejected from the theater, only too happy to get away. Jiggs, having lost just one of his stock of quarts, was persuaded to return to his seat. The house lights were dimmed and the movie restarted. Raymond Walters went into hiding for a couple of weeks, and Fritz tried to pass off the bruise on his cheek as a mark of honor, but everyone knew better. I saw Jiggs coming toward me on Fourth Street a couple of days later and thought, “oh shit. I’m in for it now.” But he just nodded and walked on by.

From the Lindley Theater, Fifth Street ran south and downhill for two blocks before meeting Lindley Avenue and the J Bus line that connected us to Germantown on the west and Frankford to the east. Going north on Fifth was always going “up” Fifth Street, with this single exception. Either because of topography or gravity, going down the long slope from Rockland Street on Fifth Street was always going “down” Fifth Street. One of the more worldly of my fifth-grade classmates claimed that such local, arcane knowledge was employed by the F.B.I. during the war to trip up enemy spies. I had to agree that it might have worked with German agents who probably looked a lot like us. But in Olney in the 1940’s, we would have made short work of any Japanese spies without having to quiz them about the ups and downs of Fifth Street.

Amid the vacuum cleaner parts stores, taprooms, small grocery and variety stores, there was one place that briefly held my attention. For a year or two, a necktie store was open on Fifth Street, just above Ruscomb. I was in high school and desperate to make the distinctions that might elevate my social status among my peers. We had to wear neckties to school, and I had taken to wearing solid-colored knit ties. The little shop on Fifth Street had an amazing selection of knit ties at the even more amazing price of three for a dollar. A collecting mania must have seized me because I began buying them three at a time until my purchases became increasingly absurd. By my third or fourth visit to the store, I was hitting an aesthetic bottom with ties of mustard yellow, pale violet and even one in bright orange. In addition to acquiring a closet filled with neckties I’d never wear, I also gained a minor insight into the irrational power of the human urge to collect things.

The man running the tie shop dressed like a downtown businessman. He wore a suit, a white shirt and, of course, a necktie. He was balding, middle-aged and wore plastic rimmed glasses. The first time he turned toward me, I saw that a horrendous reddish-purplish birthmark covered the entire one side of his face and that streaks of it splashed over to the other side. I pretended to look at neckties, but very quickly made my way back out the door. I found it very difficult to return, but my discomfort at this man’s misfortune was offset by a powerful lust for picking up knit neckties at three for a buck. I did keep going back, and while I tried to avoid looking directly at the guy or making eye contact, something about the way he said hello to me, how he treated me like a customer, not a kid, made me feel that he was a nice guy.

I was aware that there were many people in the world less fortunate than me. There were people right in the neighborhood; retarded adults, kids with cerebral palsy, kids crippled by polio, desperately poor people. But because I believed that none of these people were like me, I had been able to keep my distance. Things like that couldn’t really happen to regular, normal people like me. Not really. I think it was the respectable normality of the disfigured man in the tie shop that brought me up short. Once I allowed myself to think of the tie man as a person like my father, or my uncles or other grownups, I was over into wondering what was it like for him to try and meet girls, women. Was he married? Did he have kids, friends? What was it like to look in the mirror and see yourself like that and know it would never change? It would be nice to say that my petty vanities and my trivial obsessions with my appearance were tempered by the encounter with the tie shop man. They weren’t. A pimple blossoming on a Saturday night would still send me into wallows of self-pity and cries of “why now, why me.” But the tie store guy was a first for me. After him, it would become increasingly difficult to maintain any illusions about the singularity of my place in the universe. There was another spin-off from my near epiphany in the tie store. My father stumbled onto my collection of ghastly colored neckties. “Why don’t you wear that yellow one today,” he’d say, looking up from his newspaper and grinning. Or, “how about letting me wear that bright green one to work tomorrow?” The ties stayed around for a year or so until I could begin hiding them one at time in our weekly trash collection.

Coming downhill from Rockland, Fifth Street leveled out from Ashdale Street to the traffic light at Lindley Avenue. That short block had two taprooms almost next door to each other but drawing on completely different demographics. Moran’s, closest to the corner, was a no-nonsense, Irish, blue-collar, male enclave. Two doors away from the respectability of Moran’s, at 5050 North Fifth Street, was the Fifty-Fifty Tavern. In the summers before air-conditioning, bars would prop open their doors and whatever was going on inside could be overheard by anyone passing by. The Fifty-Fifty had gotten a reputation. The word was that a lot of carrying on went on at the Fifty-Fifty, nudge-nudge, wink-wink, you-know/you-know. On one hot mid-week afternoon in 1946 or 1947, the news flashed around the neighborhood. Father Buckley, outraged at tales of parish housewives cavorting with men other than their wedded husbands in the Fifty-Fifty, left the quiet of his rectory, crossed Fifth Street and marched himself through the taproom’s open front door. The shameless women were ordered out, told to go home and attend to making decent dinners for their hardworking husbands. The bartender was informed that he, Father Buckley, had the downtown connections to have the place padlocked as a public nuisance if these disgraceful shenanigans continued. The Fifty-fifty was never the same, business fell off and the place changed hands several times.

Separating the Fifty-fifty from Moran’s was Gianinni’s Pharmacy, the exact location of the precise moment of my irrevocable fall from divine grace. It happened on a Sunday morning in June of 1950. I was twelve years old, and my seventh-grade school year had ended earlier that week. While my faith in the tenets of the One Holy, Roman and Apostolic Church was at best weak and undefined, despite seven years of intense indoctrination, I did leave the house that sunny Sunday morning with the intention of attending ten-fifteen mass in the basement church at Incarnation.

It was summertime, and we didn’t have to attend the children’s mass and sit with our parish school classmates. Over the summer, we were free to attend the mass of our choice. Ten-fifteen mass was cool. My grandfather, tall, lean, and dressed in his black, pinstriped Sunday suit, was usually among the regulars who stood in the back of the church every week. The more aggressive of the parish priests would periodically try to sweep the stand-up crowd out of the back of the church and into the pews. Standing in the back also made for a quick, or better yet, early exit from mass. Twelve-year-old kids could not get away with standing in the back of the church.

On this warm, bright Sunday morning as I approached Fifth and Lindley and the Incarnation Church, I spotted Charlie Lobishinski standing on the corner. “Gianinni’s got a new machine,” he said. That meant a new pinball machine had been installed in Gianinnni’s drug store on the other side of Fifth Street. With a few minutes to spare before mass, Charlie and I cut across the street and went in through the propped open door of the drug store.

Gianinni’s was not a kid-friendly place. Neighborhood drug stores worked to maintain an image of dignity and professionalism that separated them out from the Mom and Pop candy stores. Pharmacists wore white smocks or neckties, and filled their walls with an intimidating array of college degrees, diplomas, licenses, and certificates. Gianinni’s was a real pharmacy, but it was also the only drugstore in the neighborhood with a pinball machine. The probable reason for a machine in the store was that the Gianinnis had a couple of teen-aged sons.

You could go in and play the pinball machine, and two, maybe three spectators or alternate players might be tolerated. But at the slightest provocation, real or imagined, Mr. Gianinni would begin shouting “Out! Out! Out, all of you!” No matter that you had a ball in play, or even three or four balls left on your nickel. When I went into Gianinni’s, I tip-toed.

Fuzzy Butler was inside trying to get the feel of the new machine. Charlie and I silently critiqued his technique as he worked the flippers and gently shook the machine to keep his ball in play. Each machine had a tilt mechanism that would shut the game down if the shaking got too vigorous. For the better players, the trick in beating any machine lay in getting the feel for the sensitivity of the tilt point. Fuzzy’s commitment to pinball approached addiction. He was good, and Charlie and I watched in silent respect as he depleted the pile of nickels that lay on the glass top of the machine.

The backlit lettering on the upright glass scoreboard read “Mexican Holiday.” Like most of the pinball machines in the neighborhood, it was the product of F. Gottlieb and Company, Chicago. The pinball machines of the 1950’s were decorated with garish, soft-core depictions of pinup girls. They were brightly lit, brightly colored, glass-topped electro-mechanical contraptions with Spike Jones sound effects, flipper buttons and solenoid sprung bumpers. They were challenging, and an ability to play well updated the W. C. Fields line about a skill for billiards indicating a misspent youth.

When Fuzzy finished up his supply of nickels without racking up any free games, which were the only thing you could win playing pinball, Charlie and I were already ten minutes past the start of mass. “I don’t have any money,” said Charlie. “Let’s go to church.” “You go ahead,” I said. “I’ll see you over there.”

I didn’t have any money either. But inside my sport jacket pocket was the paper envelope that my mother gave me every Sunday when I left the house for mass. Inside that envelope, as I well knew, were three nickels. I knew. I knew. I knew. And the measure of my secret knowledge was that even though I was the only one in the store other than Mr. Gianinni, I didn’t dare bring the envelope out into the light of day. He was busy behind his prescription counter paying me no attention. Discreetly, casually, I reached inside my pocket. After some fumbling with the fingers of just one hand, I unsealed the envelope.

The three nickels, a rough equivalent to thirty pieces of silver, were loose in my pocket. As casually as I could, I took out one nickel from my pocket and let it drop into the coin slot of Mr. F. Gottlieb’s “Mexican Holiday.” That slot could have been the mouth of Satan himself. From the brightly-lit glass of the scoreboard, the painted senoritas leered at me. I fully expected alarms to begin ringing, maybe thunder, maybe lightening, maybe the sky parting and a booming voice from a biblical movie revealing to the world just exactly what I had done. In very short order, all three nickels were gone. I had not beaten the new machine. I had not racked up any free games.

Unsmitten by any avenging angels of the Lord, I went outside into the warm morning sunshine and thought, what now? Too late to go into church. Besides, what would I do when the head usher, usually the dapper, wavy-haired Beau Barnes, the parish’s most eligible bachelor, ran his long-handled wicker basket under my nose? I had nothing to offer but a torn, empty envelope, the incriminating evidence of my sacrilege. I knew also in my soul that when that happened, the entire congregation of the ten-fifteen mass in the basement church at Incarnation, including my own grandfather, would turn in unison to face me, my mortal sin revealed to all creation, the living and the dead.

On the other hand, it was a nice day. If I skirted the church by way of Ashdale Street, no one would see me. No one would know I was bagging mass. I could walk over to Third and up to Duncannon and see if anybody was hanging out at Joe’s candy store. On the way over, with the fingers of the same one hand in my pocket, I could tear the empty collection envelope into tiny pieces, and I could let them drop to the sidewalk, piece by piece by piece. No one would ever know.

Across the Fifth Street trolley tracks from Gianinni’s Pharmacy, in perfect, if not coincidental proximity to the Incarnation Church, was the Quinn Funeral Home. It was conceded that eventually Tom Quinn would plant everyone in Olney, every Catholic at least. A dapper man, tall, elegant and given to the dark suits of his trade, Mr. Quinn wore his gray-black hair slicked back flat to his head. Further setting him apart was a waxed and spiked “Kaiser Bill” mustache with sharp, stiff points that stuck out almost an inch on each side of the main growth. It was said of the hairy signature on Tom Quinn’s upper lip, that it had never gotten wet. When old Tom hoisted a drink, something he was known to do with regularity, the points of the mustache supposedly turned upward of their own accord.

The Quinns’ were among the first in the neighborhood to get a television set. I went to school with the youngest of the Quinn kids, Terry. He and I shared a passion for everything having to do with the recent war, and I was invited in to watch several episodes of the documentary series based on the Eisenhower book, “Crusade in Europe.” Growing up in a funeral parlor, Terry’s idea of great fun was try to spook his friends by walking them through the embalming room. A story that gained currency with every telling was that Joey Schwartz wet himself when Terry turned the lights off and left him in there with a corpse. The vehemence of Joey’s denials kept the tale alive for years. While I was afraid of virtually everything, that kind of stuff didn’t bother me. After my second visit, Terry didn’t bother with the detour through the embalming room.

I had first been to Quinn’s in 1946 when I was eight years old, following the death of my grandmother, my father’s mother. Over the years, I found myself back there again and again, mumbling a “sorry for your troubles,” and finally having it mumbled to me. I was in Quinn’s the night in 1954 when my father’s oldest brother, my Uncle Matt, was laid out for viewing. The heat of the family estrangement following the Christmas Day donnybrook of 1945 had cooled with the passage of nearly a decade. The neutral ground of the funeral home, and most profoundly the untimely death of their brother at the age of forty-eight had put the remaining eight brothers and sisters on their best behavior. All but Mickey.

Mickey was my Uncle Michael, the youngest of my father’s four brothers. Mickey had been in the war, in the infantry. He’d been in North Africa, Sicily and Italy. We didn’t see much of Mickey, but when we did, he left an impression. Before the family had fallen apart, Mickey had been my favorite uncle. Like many alcoholics, Mickey was a charmer. He always seemed to be having fun. He was irreverent, teasing, laughing, full of life, a benign wise guy. My brother and I thought Mickey was great. We thought he was funny. Later, my mother knowingly would add something like, “yeah, your Uncle Mickey’s real funny all right.”

The night of my Uncle Matt’s viewing, the main room of Quinn’s was overflowing with friends, neighbors and relatives in their somber best. My Uncle Matt had seemed to me to be a distant, difficult man. He and my father, though never close, were thrown together as the two non-drinkers among the nine brothers and sisters. The untimely nature of Matt’s death at forty-eight barely registered on my sixteen-year-old mind. To me forty-eight was old, and old people died. We were standing next to the open casket surrounded by the usual overwhelming array of large, floral arrangements when sounds of a commotion arose from near the front door. “Mickey, cut it out,” I heard my Uncle Joe shout. Mickey was having none of it. He pushed his way up to the casket dragging his brothers, my Uncle Joe and Uncle Frank, with him. He was wobbly on his feet, but his voice was strong. “What the hell kind of a tribe are we, anyway?” A rhetorical question as his voice cracked and broke. “Jesus Christ,” he sobbed. “It takes one of us lying dead in a box before we can talk to each other.” He was just getting wound up, but Joe and Frank had him under the arms, and were steering him through the now silent crowd toward the door and out on to Fifth Street. “C’mon Mickey, let’s get you some air,” I heard Frank say. By now my twin aunts, Nelly and Norah were bellowing, and their younger sisters Ann and Catherine had picked up the wail. It was like the aftermath of a bombing. Several long minutes elapsed before the flat, droning buzz of small talk could resume and absorb the last of the shock waves set off by Mickey’s drunken lament. Years later Mickey did get sober, and he and my father reconciled. The surface geniality and the requisite pleasantries they would exchange at family functions hid a cautious and tentative formality. They were brothers, but too much had been said, too much had happened for them to ever again be friends.

Going past, to or from Quinn’s Funeral Home, meant passing Munder’s Plumbing Supply where Mr. Munder kept the shop window filled with the scale models made by his son Richard. The craftsmanship was dazzling and the permanent collection included at least one masterpiece, a meticulously detailed, two-foot balsa-wood replica of a Japanese submarine. I doubt I ever walked past without stopping or at least slowing down to look at that perfectly detailed model, its conning tower topped by a tiny cloth flag, a hand-painted Rising Sun. I stayed on guard to not allow Richard Munder ever to catch me admiring his work. His puffed-up sense of himself approached the insufferable. It was hard to say hello to Richard without his trying to impress you about what a big deal he was. In the words of my mother, Richard was always “putting an act on.” He went on to become a doctor with a practice up on Fifth Street near Tabor Road. If his name and status came up, someone would inevitably add that, “yeah, but he’s not a real doctor, not an M.D. He’s one of those other kind of doctors, an osteopath.” You want to move up, you better move out.

Crossing Lindley Avenue and coming north on Fifth Street, the block to Duncannon Avenue was dominated by the lawn of the Incarnation Church. A wall, in the same gray granite as the church itself, was shoulder high to a ten-year-old, and ran for half the distance of the block. When the aged Irish monsignor died, a memorial in his honor was proposed. After a fund drive, the choices for the tribute boiled down to building a library for the parish school, endowing a college scholarship in the name of the late pastor, or erecting a statue of Our Lady of Fatima in a stone grotto on the church lawn where the faithful could stop to say their decades of the Rosary. After a charade of an open process, the new pastor happily announced the winner. It would be the grotto, of course.

The neighborhood’s only automobile dealership, the showroom and garage of Oxford Auto Sales, a Hudson franchise, lay just past the end of the church property. It opened in 1946, cashing in on the bottled-up demand for cars caused by the four-year wartime halt in civilian car production. The agency’s owner, a short man, looked like a cross between Lowell Thomas and Howard Hughes. He had a Clark Gable pencil mustache, and he wore a wide brimmed brown fedora, and rolled the sleeves of his white shirts up above his elbows. He always wore a necktie. Passing him going to and from school at Incarnation, the kids began addressing him as Mr. Hudson. At first, he’d stop us and correct us, stating that his name was Mr. Billingsley, not Mr. Hudson. The kids paid him no heed, and soon even adults were referring to him as Mr. Hudson. Figuring that it was probably good for business, he gave up and seemed to accept his identification with his product. The Hudson Motorcar Company went out of business in 1957, joining Kaiser, Fraser, Packard, DeSoto and so many others in the junkyard of American automotive nameplates.

Across the wide span of Duncannon Avenue on Fifth Street, Bill’s Saloon was another taproom with a spotty reputation. On warm afternoons, going back to school from lunch, we could look into the darkness through the open door under the sign that read “Ladies Entrance,” and see neighborhood ladies of sorts in housedresses sitting at the bar. One of my schoolmates, Billy Dunphy, lived a few doors up the street, and his father was a regular in Bill’s. Mr. Dunphy would get off the Forty-Seven Car coming home from work and disappear into Bill’s. An hour or two later, he’d be seen reeling up Duncannon Avenue toward home, toward God knows what kind of a homecoming. At the fiftieth reunion of our parish school class, I sat next to Billy Dunphy and noted that he nursed Diet Cokes all night.

Like many of the retail businesses in our neighborhood, the fresh fruit and vegetable store next to Bill’s Saloon was the economic equivalent of a street vendor with walls and a front door. The proprietor, a grim-faced Jewish man, was assisted by an equally taciturn wife who limped and wore clunky orthopedic shoes. The husband had a black toothbrush mustache and wore eyeglasses with lenses that were almost opaque. In the morning, the two of them would be out on the sidewalk setting up the worn wooden display table that held the cases of apples, oranges, turnips, potatoes, cabbages. No matter the weather, he wore the same black, long-sleeved, button-front sweater, a white apron and a brown pork-pie hat with the brim turned up all around. As we walked by his store on our way to and from school, he’d look right through and past us. On those few discomforting occasions when we made eye contact, I would feel compelled to nod or say hello. I never got a response. When I heard them speaking to customers, it was in heavy guttural accents. They were already there when we moved to Olney in 1945, which would seem to preclude their having been Holocaust survivors. Possibly they had gotten out before the full catastrophe. What private or historical circumstances accounted for the sad, cold detachment they seemed to feel for the world surrounding them I’ll never know. They lived above the store, and sometimes on Sunday mornings, I’d see them waiting silently at the trolley stop on the other side of Fifth Street, dressed in the same clothes they wore all week.

If a Middle-Europa darkness hung over the tiny fruit and vegetable store, Joe Lalli’s shoe repair next door was all Italian sunlight. The days of closets filled with shoes for all occasions were still decades away. Like most of the kids we knew, my brother and I each had two pairs of shoes, one pair for good and the other for school and play. Heroic efforts were usually in order to avoid spending for new shoes. Worn down heels would be replaced by durable hard rubber heels that left black marks on wooden floors. The steel cleats nailed into heels and toes that extended the life of cheap shoes made walking down the aisle at mass sound like a tap dancing class. Half-soles tacked and sewn to uppers, and leather top and side patches that never quite matched were our badges of worthy frugality. If one of us came home with a sole flapping or a heel worn thin, my mother’s first recourse was always a trip to Joe’s Shoe Repair. The expenditure of six dollars and ninety-five cents for new shoes at Father and Son Shoes up Fifth Street was her last resort.

Joe Lalli’s shoe repair shop created a lasting sensory impact. In addition to the smells of fresh leather, the caustic odors of the glues, solvents and polishes of the cobbler’s trade, there was the sound of the all-day Italian radio broadcasts turned up loud enough to override the whirring and whooshing of Joe’s amazing array of belt-driven brushes and grinders. Joe himself was a wiry little man with a head of equally wiry and frizzed-out gray hair that made every kid who saw him think of Larry Fine of Three Stooges fame. Joe liked to chat, but his almost impenetrable Italian accent made the process painful. To the dramatic aural backdrop of grand opera, Joe would take up the shoes my mother had brought in. He would squint, scratch his head and carefully examine the questionable shoes like the craftsman he was. My mother would silently await his cost-benefit analysis on the salvageability of a worn out pair of seven dollar shoes as if Joe were a surgeon making a life or death decision. We were steady customers at Joe’s, and he stayed on in his Fifth Street shop long after the neighborhood changed, after Italian radio went off the air and after worn shoes became throw-away items.

Between Joe Lalli’s shoe repair shop and home stood the first of my many adolescent sanctuaries, Leon’s Luncheonette. Hanging out at Leon’s had started while I was twelve-years-old and in the seventh grade at Incarnation. For the next two-and-a-half years, until the afternoon of Tommy Scalen and Bobby Falco’s vicious ridicule of Leon had taken my measure and found me wanting, I had been content to spend my every leisure moment inside or out on the sidewalk in front of Leon’s. Within weeks of what had been my first, but not my last, experience of anti-Semitism, I drifted east on Duncannon Avenue to find a new home at Joe Sheperla’s Candy Store. The circle I entered at Joe’s was wilder, more adventurous and more prone to trouble. There were cars, beer and occasionally girls. I felt I had moved up in the world.

I kept in touch with what was happening at Leon’s. On a warm Sunday morning in late March of 1952, coming up Fifth Street on my way home from nine-o-clock mass in the Incarnation’s basement church, I saw Mort Callahan and Bobby Falco sitting on O’Dea’s front steps next to Leon’s. I stopped and lit a cigarette, offering one to Bobby. Mort Callahan didn’t smoke. Mort lived on the western marches of the neighborhood, over in Logan, a couple of doors away from a small orthodox synagogue on Eighth Street just off Lindley Avenue. On Sabbath, he got paid to turn the lights on and off, move chairs, to do whatever couldn’t be done by observant members of the congregation. Some wise guy began calling him the rabbi. That turned into the Reverend Mordicai Callahan, which in turn became Mort. His real name was Robert.

Lighting my cigarette and Bobby’s, I had the long view down Fifth Street toward the traffic light at Duncannon. I’d be able to see my mother and father coming up the street from church. One of the myths of my home life was that I didn’t smoke, and I did my best not to make an issue of it. A year later and five miles away, as I stood smoking away on the corner of Sixth and Susquehanna waiting for the Route Thirty-Nine Car, my mother going past on the Forty-Seven spotted me. Feeling secure so far away from home, I was shocked to hear her voice from the passing trolley. “I see you smokingggg,” she sang out in a fade as the Forty-Seven car slid away down Sixth Street. A pack a day smoker for over three and a half years, it was the first time I’d been caught in the act.

Whatever the conversation I had going with Bobby and Mort, it was interrupted by a car pulling slowly up to curb with the engine running noisily. It was a rusted four-door sedan in faded black, probably a 1935 or 1936 Pontiac or a Plymouth. I know the headlights were exterior mounts on the fenders and they started putting them in the fenders with the 1937 models. While the car itself was unremarkable, the face of the driver sitting low behind the wheel was a shocker. It was Ronnie Cusak. Ronnie had been in my eighth-grade class at Incarnation. Ronnie was the same age as me, fourteen. In the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1952, as now, fourteen-year olds were not licensed to operate motor vehicles.

The Cusaks had arrived in the neighborhood while I was in seventh-grade. Ronnie and his two younger brothers, I think there was also a sister, immediately gaining a reputation for trouble and worse, fearlessness. The whole Cusak family had a shabby, raggedy look. They had moved into a rundown corner house at Sixth and Fishers. Ronnie affected a quiet, devil-may-care attitude. He was funny in a sly, quiet way, but was quick to take offence and had an inordinate number of fistfights in the short time they'd lived in the neighborhood. I didn't hang out with Ronnie, nor had I had any real run ins with him, other than the night before Thanksgiving a year and a half earlier when I gotten drunk for the first time in my life. Ronnie had been one of the kids who had stolen the case of beer that we carted off into the dark recesses of the Morrison schoolyard.

Much amused, Mort, Bobby and I walked over to the open passenger side window to see what was going on. Ronnie grinned back at us, his hand on the big vibrating gearshift rod that rose from the hump in the center of the floor. His little brother, a couple of grades behind us at Incarnation, was on the passenger side of the front bench seat. “Wanna go for a ride,” smiled Ronnie. “Get in the back, Tommy,” he said to his brother. Tommy climbed over the seat, throwing himself into the back of the car. Bobby got in front. Mort and I joined Tommy in the back of the car. I had the rear passenger side window. To my disappointment, the crank wouldn’t turn and the window wouldn’t go down. Not being in cars very often, I felt that having the window down was the major thrill element of a car ride.

At ten on a Sunday morning, there was little or no traffic on Fifth Street. Ronnie released the clutch and the car began lurching and jerking as he spun it into a U-turn and headed south on Fifth Street, sliding on the trolley tracks as he picked up speed. The air was filled by the suffering sound of metal on metal as Ronnie yanked and twisted the shifting arm in his attempts to find the next higher gear. Distracted by the complexities of shifting gears, he lost control of the wheel. As we swerved across Fifth Street, I heard the clanging bell of the oncoming trolley car before I saw it. A large, dark green shape flashed past by the narrowest of inches as we sped on our mad path down Fifth Street and right through the red light at Lindley Avenue.

We had a Green light at Rockland Street, and Ronnie managed to slow the car as we went down the short slope toward Roosevelt Boulevard. If he had tried to run the red signal across Roosevelt Boulevard, ten lanes wide, there probably would have been at least five full Requiem Masses later that week in the upper church at Incarnation. The fate of the occupants of another car or cars didn’t enter my mind. At the light Ronnie wrestled with the shifter, grinding away in a failing attempt to find first gear. Bobby Falco suggested that if Ronnie would work the clutch, he Bobby, would do the shifting. Off we went, with just a few less lurching spasms.

Looking around, I saw what a sad junker the Cusak family car was. Dirty windows, stuffing coming out of the seats, headliner ripped and hanging, and old food and trash covering the seats and floor. We headed up the hill to Hunting Park Avenue, and I turned to Tommy Cusak to ask what would happen if their father discovered the car missing. “Shit,” he said and shrugged. “Nothing. And he won’t even know it’s gone. Neither of them are going to come to until this afternoon.” I knew plenty of kids who had drunken fathers, but this was the first family I’d encountered where both the mother and the father were problem boozers.

Ronnie did a squealing two-wheeler around the corner of Fifth and Erie, throwing me, Tommy and Mort Callahan into a heap against the driver’s side door. Another screaming turn up a narrow side street of row houses followed by a lurching slowdown as Bobby Falco twisted the shifting arm to find a lower gear. Ronnie slid the car to a stop and said, “that’s my Grandmom’s house. We used to live there before we moved to Inky,” he said. “She’s dead now,” he added as we began to cruise past a row of old look-alike, flat-fronted row houses. I remember that some of the houses still had the Sunday papers lying on their small, white marble front steps.

Ronnie worked the car back on to Erie Avenue with Bobby still shifting and we ran east to Front Street where another near rollover occurred as we turned too fast to head north and back toward the neighborhood. By now the novelty and the excitement of going fast in a car had faded. I just wanted Ronnie to slow down enough to get us back in one piece.

Back across the boulevard, where fortunately the light was green, we made our way through the quiet neighborhood streets back to Fifth Street. Ronnie slowed to a stop about ten feet out from the curb at Leon’s, and I knew I was fortunate to be getting out of that car on my own power. Tommy climbed back over the seat into the front next to Ronnie, who nonchalantly tooted the horn as he tried to get the shifter into first gear. Screeching, jerking and swerving, he flew away north toward Fishers Avenue and home. I saw him at the newspaper branch the next afternoon and asked if he’d gotten in any trouble over taking the car. “Nah,” he said. “My old man didn’t know what day it was when he got up, let alone that anybody had moved that fucking car.” Before the year was gone, so were the Cusaks. My mother, who kept an ear to the ground, said they’d been put out of their house for getting behind on the rent.

More than twenty years later, I ran into Mort Callahan. Among other things, he said that late one night he had cut a yellow light too close on Rhawn Street. Behind him came the flashing lights of a police car. When the cop came up to ask to see his license, the cop was Ronnie Cusak. “We recognized each other right away,” said Mort. “I knew he wasn’t going to give me a ticket, but he stood there while we got caught up on old times, him with same goofy grin of his. And then,” said Mort, “of all people, he’s got the balls to tell me I should be more careful about my driving.”

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the kidnapped tour operator contacted his German wife and told her of the threat, which she reported to Egyptian authorities.The masked kidnappers took the 19 people -- five Italians, five Germans, a Romanian and eight Egyptians -- while they were on an adventure safari in southwestern Egypt on Friday.

It was the first time foreign tourists had been kidnapped in Egypt and the case posed a new challenge to the security-conscious government in a country which depends on foreign tourism accounts for 6 percent of the national economy.

Islamic militants have hit the country's tourist industry in recent decades with bomb and gun attacks that have killed hundreds. The official said Egyptian authorities had traced to Sudan calls from the kidnappers to the tour operator's German wife.

The Egyptian state-owned daily newspaper al-Ahram on Tuesday quoted Tourism Minister Zoheir Garrana as saying the hostages were all in good health, and that German authorities were in talks with the kidnappers over the ransom.

Security sources said on Monday the kidnappers were demanding 6 million euros ($8.8 million) to free the hostages, and said there was no sign militant Islamists were involved. A security source said Egyptian authorities were also in talks with the kidnappers

For others, however, blogging is a necessary activity that frequently places their lives in jeopardy, and yet they continue to defy warnings in order to publicise the wrongs of their society and government.

One such blogger is Slim Boukhdhir, a Tunisian Internet journalist who has been subjected to continuous harassment since he was freed in July after a politically motivated imprisonment.

Officers had alleged that Boukhdhir insulted them, prompting a questionable prosecution, as witnesses interviewed by Boukhdir’s lawyers and family members said police falsified statements to incriminate the journalist.

The judge at Boukhdir’s trial also prohibited prosecution witnesses from being cross-examined, while the one-year sentence he received for insulting police was previously unheard of for such offenses.

On his release from jail, Boukhdir remained unbowed, stating:

My release from jail is a victory for freedom and independent journalism. The Tunisian regime failed to break my will and determination to carry on with independent and ethical journalism.

Boukhdhir spent eight months in prison for writing articles critical of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, but was once more abducted on Saturday night, while walking to an Internet café in downtown Sfax.

Bundled into a car and taken first to a police station near the city’s old district and then to an isolated area about nine miles (15 kilometers) west of Sfax, his captors then threatened him before forcing him from the car.

In an interview with the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Boukhdhir recounted:

After leaving the police station, they started insulting me and threatened to inflict on me the same fate of Libyan Internet journalist Daif Al Ghazal, kidnapped and killed in neighboring Libya in 2005. They even claimed they had nothing to do with Tunisian police and were hired by a fictitious man allegedly to teach me a lesson for having an affair with his wife.

According to the journalist, he believes the abduction was sparked by his recent article urging Ben Ali to follow Rice’s advice to loosen the state’s grip on civil society.

The 9 September piece was posted on the officially banned Tunisian news site Tunisnews and the Egyptian news site Al-Masryun, on which Boukhdhir argued that Rice’s call for reform was an opportunity Ben Ali should not miss.

Whether it is deemed political or religious-based criticism, writers such as Boukhdir continue to challenge the constraints, and by doing so ensure that freedom of expression survives.

It can only be hoped that it does not come at the cost of life, however.

[Image via: Menassat.]

Saudi Telecom has announced its plan to seek foreign expansion, particularly in north Africa as competition in domestic market heightens.

According to company chief executive officer, Saud al-Duweish, they aim to cut 14 percent of their workforce at home and boost efforts to pursue a foreign expansion plan primarily in north Africa.

Mr al-Duweish told media yesterday that, "we are interested in Middle East and north Africa in general but we are looking at north Africa in particular."

He reportedly said, "there is only Morocco" left for acquisitions after Algeria stalled privatisation of Algeria Telecom.

He noted that company was interested in purchasing a stake in Moroc Telecom owned by France's Vivendi.

"We tested waters for Moroc Telecom, but we didn't get positive feedback. We hope Vivendi will change its mind. We will always be interested in Algeria, which is a country with huge potential," he was quoted as saying.

Saudi Telecom is among firms reportedly competing for a 25 percent stake in Oman Telecommunications Company.

Saudi Telecom is said to be under intense pressure to improve profitability as a regional telecom war heats up, with rivals like Kuwait's Zain and Emirates Telecommunications competing within Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Telecom has reportedly spent in excess of US$ 6 billion on foreign expansion in past 15 months.

"We are comfortable with financing of any transaction that may seem worth it. We have excellent ratings," company CEO said.

A top United States official Condoleeza Rice was embarking on a tour in the Maghreb region.

The tour will however exclude Mauritania whose relations with US were strained by 6 August coup of democratic regime of president Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi.

Ms Rice will visit Libya, Tunisia and Algeria before finishing the tour with a four-day diplomatic visit to Morocco.

She will hold talks with top officials of the four countries on several bilateral and regional issues.

US official will amongst others discuss with Algeria and Morocco on issues concerning Western Sahara, state department has disclosed.

Some analysts believe the tour was mainly meant to further strengthen Washington's ties with Libya and US influence in Maghreb region.

According to state department spokesman Sean McCormack, Rice's landmark trip to Libya would usher in a new era of relations between the two nations.

"It's a historic stop," McCormack said, admitting that the visit will be the first by a US secretary of state in more than half a century.

Relations between Tripoli and Washington began to improve in 2003 after Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi abandoned efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction, stop exporting terrorism and compensate families of victims of Lockerbie bombing.

The visit comes less than two weeks [14 August] after Libya and US finally reached a comprehensive deal that guarantee compensation to US victims of 1988 Lockerbie bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. Libyans killed in 1986 when US warplanes bombed Tripoli and Benghazi would also be compensated.

The settlement of all outstanding lawsuits against Tripoli by US victims has led to restoration of full diplomatic ties between the two countries, with president George Bush describing Libya as a "model of diplomatic success."

"The secretary's visit is going to be a huge demonstration of the fact that by changing behavior, a country can change the nature of a relationship," US assistant secretary of state Paula De Sutter told a news conference, adding that "countries that change terrorism behavior, cooperate with us, have a way forward."

American companies are beginning to compete with Europeans and Asians to tap into Libya's lucrative markets, especially the energy sector.

The North African nation boasts of 36 billion barrels and natural gas reserves of 1.3 trillion cubic meters, in addition to vast unexplored new deposits.

In 2006, Africa replaced the Middle East as the largest oil exporter to US, exporting about 2.23 million barrels of oil to the country per day, according to official US statistics. This was the first time in 21 years.

Making another guest appearance today at MediaShack is Adrian.  Read his previous post on Al-Qaeda_ and Deterance and check out his blog Politics_and_Soccer.